You can watch DVDs and video tapes from: Bermuda Bolivia Burma Cambodia Canada Chile Columbia Costa Rica Cuba El Salvador Ecuador Guatemala Honduras Japan Mexico Nicaragua Panama Peru Philippines Puerto Rico South Korea Surinam Taiwan U.S.A. Venezuela Dominican Republic

But unless the DVD or video tape came from one of these countries, it's in a format that your DVD player or VCR probably can't play -- either the PAL or possibly the SECAM format (detailed list). Likewise, if you're planning to send a DVD or tape of Uncle Fred and Aunt Frieda's wedding anniversary to a friend in England, or Ghana, or Martinique or France, your friend won't be able to view your DVD or tape on her equipment. In either case, you're a candidate for a format conversion, a process in which your original DVD or tape is run through a special converter, which makes a copy of the original in the proper format: PAL for England, SECAM for France and NTSC for the U.S.A. You get back the original, unaltered.

• What we can't convert: Copyright and Copy Protected Materials
  • The good news is: you've found the commercial DVD or tape you've been looking for -- Disney's Song of the South, for example.

  • The bad news is twofold:
    • It's copyright protected, which makes it against the law for us to make a copy;

      To protect their copyrighted property, artists embed an electronic signal in the DVD or tape that prevents a copy from being made. Conversions are treated as "copying" by copy protected DVDs and tapes. Typically the picture will "roll over" every few seconds, colors will change rapidly and, in extreme cases, both the video and audio will become completely unstable and unusable.

      So we can't make a conversion of commercially produced DVDs and tapes for you even if we were willing to break the law, which we aren't!

      Some DVD players will play both NTSC and PAL/SECAM discs. Try yours and see. Otherwise, you'll have to look for an NTSC formated copy of the commercial material.

    • If it isn't copy protected, we still may not be able to do a conversion. There are 7 DVD encoding "regions," only two of which -- Region 0 and Region 1 -- are we able to convert. Standard U.S. DVD players won't play anything other than these two regions.

• What we can convert: DVDs and tapes you've made or had made for you

  If you, your family or friends have made the DVD or tape, or it's something we've made for you at VideOccasions -- a DVD from old film, for example -- or the tape was made by relatives abroad, or if you have permission from an organization to copy the material, or your business had the tape produced, VideOccasions can put it into the appropriate format for you, whether it's NTSC, PAL or SECAM.

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• Source Formats and Types

  Source Format	Source Types	Converted To:
  NTSC	VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, 8mm, Hi-8, Digital8, DVCam, MiniDV, DVD	PAL or SECAM
  PAL or SECAM	VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS and DVD. No 8mm, Hi-8 or DVCam or MiniDV.	NTSC
  We can convert from DVDs in NTSC or PAL to DVDs in NTSC or PAL

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• Turn Around

  VideOccasions normally return-ships four working days after recieving mail orders. We guarantee a three working day turn-around time on all format conversions brought into our shop, and usually gets them out quicker than that. Same day Rush Orders can be made, for which there is an additional Rush Charge.

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• Fees

  Format conversions from PAL or SECAM tapes are billed at the regular duplication rates plus $10.00. Additional copies are billed at the regular duplication rate.

  Format conversions to PAL or SECAM tapes are billed at the regular duplication rates plus $10.00 for each copy.

  DVD to DVD conversions are billed as copies at the regular DVD rates, plus $10.

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Order Form for Tape Format Conversion

When shipping tapes for conversion to VideOccasions , please print and complete the Order Form, which contains shipping instructions and our mailing address. You can download the Order Form as a text file, selecting "PRINT" from the FILE MENU of your browser.

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• Shipping:

  Most of our customers ship tape to us via the U.S. Postal Service, although we also receive shipments via UPS and Fed Ex. We suggest that regardless of the method you choose to ship your tape you request “tracking” of the package so that both you and the carrier will know at all times the whereabouts of the tape package.

• The shipping address for VideOccasions may be found on the Order Form.

  Please contact VideOccasions by email or phone (425-641-4811) to discuss your format conversion if you feel the need to do so.

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Business Hours Phone: 425-641-4811
Monday - Friday	10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Pacific Time Zone
Thursday	10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Pacific Time Zone
And please remember: when it's 10:00 a.m. in New York, it's only 7:00 a.m. in Seattle!

We hope this has answered your questions regarding format conversion. If you have unanswered questions, call us at 425-641-4811 (remembering that when it's 10:00 a.m. on the East Coast, it's only 7:00 a.m. in Seattle) or e-mail us and we'll do our best to answer them.

Thanks for contacting VideOccasions.